


this one's for the torn down, the experts at the fall

by openended



Series: don't threaten me with a good time (victoria ryder) [2]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy, Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Blood and Injury, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Medical Procedures, Omega (the station not the dynamics), Pre-Mass Effect 2, Pre-Mass Effect: Andromeda, Unresolved Feelings, author is an accountant not a doctor and apologizes for medical inaccuracies, past abusive relationship, the last person to know garrus is in love with shepard is garrus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2018-07-21
Packaged: 2019-06-14 02:06:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15378366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openended/pseuds/openended
Summary: come on friends, get up now, you're not alone at all. One night in the intersection of Victoria Ryder and Archangel.





	this one's for the torn down, the experts at the fall

**Author's Note:**

> quick contextual note if you're new to Tori: she's a trauma surgeon and ran off to Omega after her mother's funeral. There's exploration of that and also the beginnings of her friendship with Garrus in [for saviours](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10582371), but you don't need to have read that first.

"You _still_ don't have a medic?" Victoria says as Monteague leads her into the supply closet Archangel and his crew have generously called their medbay.

Garrus looks over at her from the gurney, gingerly holding his arm very still against his chest. He's still in the bottom half of his armor, but the top half sits haphazardly - the left shoulder absolutely shattered - on the floor against the wall. "No."

She sighs and gives Monteague a subtle shove as she brushes past. Payback for interrupting the end of her date. "That's really dumb considering your line of work," she says, running her omnitool's medical scanner over his shoulder. 

"I've noticed," he says, pain laced through his tight subharmonics.

Victoria closes the scanner and starts to wash her hands. "The bullet's still in there, and it's in pieces, but it missed anything important. It's gonna hurt, but you'll live. Might even have a nifty scar. Monteague, help him with his shirt and then get out."

Monteague crosses his arms. "Why?"

"Because I can't see what I'm doing if there's bloody fabric in the way." She dries her hands. It was a _very_ good date.

Though he starts to help Garrus remove his shirt, and shortly changes his plan to one involving a pair of scissors, Monteague still eyes her. "Why am I leaving?"

"Because you're the approximate build of a brick wall, this room is half the size of an elevator shaft, and you broke into my apartment."

At that, Garrus stiffens and drags his gaze over to Monteague. "You two _broke in?_ " he says with a tone of disappointment Victoria thinks could rival the one her father used.

"And interrupted a pretty good date," she adds. That's the more important bit.

"Loitering in the hallway would've looked suspicious," Monteague defends, tugging off the last piece of fabric and tossing it into the biohazard matter recycler. 

Victoria sighs, exasperated, as she looks through the supply cabinet she set up for them after the fourth time Garrus called her over. "You guys have my contact code," she says, pulling out the tools and meds she'll need.

Garrus closes his eyes, takes a breath, and opens them again. "Fix whatever you broke, give her security system an upgrade, and the next time I tell you to get Ryder, _call her and ask._ "

For a moment, Monteague looks like he's going to argue further - it was Sensat's idea, Sensat's back there fixing it already, Ryder wasn't answering, all arguments true but falling flat against _breaking in_ \- and he wisely chooses not to. "Got it, boss. You need me for anything else?" he directs the question at Victoria.

"Check on Penny, please. Tell her I'm going to be a while."

He nods, and then leaves.

"I'm sorry about that," Garrus says as soon as the door shuts completely. 

Victoria shrugs and settles her omnispecs on her face, cycling through programs until she lands on the bioscanner with a magnifier. With a tap, it syncs to the gesture control on her omnitool, and she waves the HUD away. "I added a couple black market protocols the other week, Sensat probably enjoyed the challenge." She washes her hands again before snapping on a pair of gloves.

Garrus laughs quietly, grimacing a little around the edges of it. "Thanks for coming."

"Well, you're making my walk to the clinic safer, so. Hold still." Victoria slides a needle in under his shoulder plate to numb the area. It's a weird intersection she resides in these days - Mordin, Aria, Archangel. Galatana and its shiny clean floors, its steady bright lights, its total lack of gunfire and knife fights, all seems a lifetime ago. So does that house in Indiana, and the bouquet of daisies long rotted into the dirt. Her thirteen year-old self, sleepless from studying for entrance exams, daydreaming of Presidium hospitals and pristine white lab coats, wouldn't even recognize her. Sometimes that bothers her. Tonight it doesn't. She tosses the needle into the biohazard unit and then rests against the sink, giving the anesthetic a few moments to kick in. "Should I ask whose gun you got on the wrong end of?" 

"Minor red sand dealer," Garrus says. "He's dead now, and I know who his dealer is."

"One step at a time, right?" she says, and pokes his shoulder.

He makes an irritated noise and glares at her finger.

"Did you feel that?"

He blinks. "No."

"Good. Try not to move too much." Another wave, and the HUD returns. It takes a moment to register Garrus as turian, and then all the stats in the bottom corner roll out of red and into green, and the holographic display settles over him, highlighting veins and muscle and bone, and bullet fragments. She zooms in and starts to work.

They sit in silence for a while as Victoria digs tiny pieces of a nasty hollowpoint bullet from his shoulder. She'll have to tell Mordin and Aria there's a new arms dealer in town. Each piece lands in the metal bowl with a clink.

"So, what's their name?" she asks.

"Hm?" Garrus makes a confused sound.

"The ghost you're avoiding by setting up this little medic-less operation."

His head swivels around to stare at her. "You a therapist _and_ a surgeon?"

"No," she says idly, "just able to recognize my own brand of damage." She recognized it that night in Afterlife, even through the pounding music and flashing lights. For his sake, she's glad he seems to have put aside the rampant alcoholism he was teetering toward that night. For her sake, she's glad he remembered she was a doctor and chose her to call at 3:45 in the morning when Vorash caught a knife to the gut five months ago. Garrus pays well.

Garrus narrows his eyes. "I thought your brand of damage was the bad day," he gestures with his uninjured arm at her eye, thankfully long healed.

"I have multiple brands of damage," she says with a wry smile and gently nudges him to turn back around so she can work. "So what's their name?" she repeats.

He sighs and his rigid posture slouches a little, but not in relaxation. Defeat, maybe. "Shepard." It sounds rusty in his mouth, rough, sticking to his throat with disuse.

Victoria isn't a therapist, but she sure as hell knows pain when she hears it. And Garrus may have a hollowpoint bullet shattered in his shoulder, but she could be cleaning it out with no anesthetic and it wouldn't hurt nearly a fraction as much as Shepard does. She softens her voice. "And Shepard was...?"

"My CO. For a little while. She was," he pauses, "she was good. Really good."

A million different words he could've used, and Victoria's been around enough turians to hear what lies in the spaces in between. CO, mentor, friend. Something else, something different, something more. She doesn't call him on it, or push him to continue; they're edging a little closer toward friendship with each call, close enough she finally felt comfortable enough to ask, but they’re still dancing in that murky area between acquaintance and friend. "I'm sorry," she says.

A sad, broken noise comes from the back of his throat, and he catches it, tamps down on the broken bits, almost as soon as it happens. "She saved everyone's ass, and then they hung her out to dry. They - " he stops suddenly. His hand brushes against the armor storage compartment at his thigh. He pops it open, checks that something is still inside, and closes it again. "She died. And didn't have to. The Alliance wrote it off as another geth attack." 

The way he says _geth_ tells Victoria exactly how highly he thinks of that particular cover story.

Her first year on Omega is a little slippery, events out of order or misremembered or not at all, but Victoria remembers the blow that cracked her skull, remembers Bray calling panicked on her omnitool, remembers hearing something from a newsstand about an Alliance ship's distress call one system over as she slid into one of Aria's skycars. Remembers a text from Mordin to be at the ready if the Alliance didn't come through the relay in the next three hours, remembers swiping it away before scrubbing in to save a krogan who'd half bled out on the floor already. 

"I'm sorry," she says again. 

He nods, and she feels him pull himself back from the edge. No way in hell was Shepard just a CO. 

"What's the name of your ghost?"

She drops one last fragment into the bowl. "Mom."

Silence for half a moment. "I'm sorry."

Victoria shrugs. "Omega's a great place to run away to," she muses, dodging any follow-up questions. "Tell me about her," she says after a moment.

"Who?"

"Shepard." At his stiffened shoulders, she continues. "I spent most of 2183 either in a cloud of depression so thick I couldn't see three feet in front of me, or getting the shit kicked out of me by some asshole I accidentally let into my life. I missed the attack on the Citadel and everything. Catch me up."

He shifts slightly, just enough to look over his shoulder without jostling her work. "Is this a tactic to help me ignore that your anesthetic is _terrible_ and already wearing off?"

"Yep." She opens a suture kit.

He huffs, the smallest hint at laughter, but he starts talking. As she stitches him up, Garrus tells her about the _Normandy_. About Saren. About the short redhead woman who seemed to bend the universe by sheer force of will. About learning to drive a human-designed vehicle while she tried to set her own broken foot in the back, about making an idle comment about her height and getting absolutely smoked in headshots. "She was our field medic," he says, somewhere in between trying to remember the back half of a joke and telling her about the altercation with Saleon.

Victoria's long finished - he's bandaged up and she's cleaned up, even started the autoclave - and she crosses her arms. "Were you this bad at getting out of the way of bullets back then, too?" she smirks.

Sliding off the gurney, he tightens his mandibles, making a friendly irritated face at her.

Her smirk shifts into a smile, and she points at the bandage. "Leave that alone for 24 hours." She hands him a bottle of antibiotics. "One of these a day until you're done." A bottle of painkillers. "One every six hours for two days, then once a day as needed. I'll be back tomorrow to change the bandage, unless you have a medic by then,” the smile changes back into a smirk.

Garrus rolls his eyes, but takes both bottles from her. "Thank you."

Victoria nods. "You're welcome.” She pauses, and then decides maybe they’re closer to friendship than she’d been giving them credit for. “You're paying me pretty well, so I'm gonna throw this one in for free. It sounds like you and Shepard were really good friends. And I don't think she'd be too happy to see you in your shared afterlife of choice so soon. So even though I’m one bullet away from being able to get six months of super extended cable, try to duck a little more often, okay?"

Garrus laughs, a genuine honest laugh, and nods. "I'll try."


End file.
